of the construction sites. The flowers were straightening up in delicate vigor, the petals thick and tired, damp with sweat — the stalk was tall, so calm and hard. The room was breathing, oppressed, asleep. The smaller petals, like hair on the nape of your neck in summer, were stooping, wilted, blind, yet still able to live and amaze. Virgínia hurried laughing toward them, tilted her dark head yet retreated slightly scared. Because they would close hostile without the slightest perfume as if some thing in their nature secretly repelled Virgínia’s nature. But I always got along well with flowers — that was her impression while she was undressing — she touched them lightly with the tips of her fingers, disappointed, discreet and already uninterested. They were trembling. Without knowing why, permission had at last been given to feel sad and she was trying without really managing it all that Sunday afternoon. Her true sensation during the stroll had been so intimate, pervaded her with such delicateness that it just remained like a hesitation, an expectation. She was wanting a thing to dress her for Irene’s dinner, a calm and stable feeling, some clear certainty of defeat so that she couldn’t start again irresistibly to fight and have hopes. She got ready to go out. The white dress was stretched on the bed, lighting up the small room, giving it the look of strange and forbidden excitement. Placed in the short slip and with a body with so little in the way of waistline, she looked at herself in the mirror — would she be ready to confront other people’s laughter and shine? her face was wandering in shadows. Ever since she looked at Daniel’s black spiders her eyes were a little squinty, they’d set a quick tone of wandering and movement to her face where some indefinable trait seemed to waver almost transforming itself — her face would sometimes recall an image reflected in water. Around the room things were living profoundly tranquilized and on the street since the day before the construction noise had ceased. The other apartments in the building at that hour on Sunday were empty: the occasional shout of a child could be heard stuck in the building’s cement. With one of her hands forgotten on her face in a distracted caress she was waiting without enthusiasm. Slowly in the depth of her neglect some spot in her body started to live weakly, to pulsate accompanying the things all around . . . Now she was waiting more cautious, her eyes open, her heart open, darkly open shuddering with hope. She was waiting . . . But it was so unfamiliar the silence and her white slip, which suddenly as if she herself hadn’t been feeling the waiting, set out and kept living in another milieu, easy and light among the quiet construction sites. When she put on her dress someone banged with a jolt on the door. She opened it and found the washerwoman and her daughter with the package of washed clothes, apologizing for not having come on Saturday, looking surprised at Virgínia’s silk dress that had never been washed, Virgínia whom they always saw in poor clothes. The neckline and the fitted bodice raised her bust giving it even bigger proportions; the narrow belt was uselessly squeezing her waistline without shrinking it. The small glass buttons were trembling with every breath. The cream-white was sweetening her fine skin, making her short hair shine. She exchanged a quick look with the women, took on a worldly air while her pupils were darting around with satisfaction and pursuit:
“Now it’s completely impossible, but com-ple-te-ly!” she was saying with a busy and voluptuous pleasure. “I waited yesterday and all afternoon today, you have no idea, do me a favor and come back tomorrow, a big favor . . . tomorrow, I’ll give you dirty clothes because I have a dinner today . . . understand, I must be ready on time, the car will certainly come get me . . . Unfortunately that’s how these things are, you know . . .” — she interrupted herself with blinking eyes in search of more words for her momentum, almost pensive. With delighted and foolish faces, the washerwomen were saying yes, yes, one pushing the other one with awe and anguish while Virgínia was also seeming to push them with fascinating excuses; they were laughing humbly with affliction, disappearing down the stairs with a white smile still on their faces. Virgínia stopped, listening for an instant to the calm silence that had followed her own rampage . . . an instant more. A moment more. She was absorbed and without thoughts but it seemed to her as in an illness of will that she’d never again have strength to want to move. She asked herself for one more, one more instant. She herself was struggling against giving up. She then moved, went to comb her hair. Pensive, it occurred to her that she could never forget the offense to the washerwomen but in the same moment she thought she was late and changed course forever. Before going out, with her hand on the door latch, that prim and careful feeling of face powder and of the fragility of her appearance, she remembered and with slow coldness grabbed the scissors, cut the stem of three flowers, of the hard and opaque flowers, fastened them to the neckline of her dress, there where her large breasts and her heart were living, veiled. In a protest a green smell was rising to her nose, so acrid for her teeth, that revived her. She didn’t want to go to the dinner, she was scared! — she thought for the first time clearly in a light lament, interpreting the pale rattle that was being born, dizzy, in her chest . . . She didn’t want to, that’s what it was . . . No, that wasn’t it, how could she make so many mistakes? . . . on the contrary . . . such confusion . . . she wanted to go so powerfully that . . . she
